


back to the drawing board

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Towering Inferno (1974)
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, Post-Canon, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 17:47:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21832393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: They built the tower in Tokyo.
Relationships: Mike O'Halloran/Doug Roberts
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	back to the drawing board

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weshes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weshes/gifts).



They built the tower in Tokyo. 

Susan left him after the fire, of course, just like he'd known she would. She took the job, her big promotion, and as much as he wanted to resent her for that, as much as he wanted to yell and curse and all those other verbs that really just came down to one thing in the end (his heart breaking, or at least something kinda like it), he knew she was right to go. He told her she was selfish and she called him a son of a bitch. To be honest, he didn't disagree with her assessment. 

So, he drank. He drank and he drank and he drank some more, whiskey or bourbon, malt liquor at any rate because it seemed to get the job done fastest: cheap stuff from the store on the corner or the single malt Jim Duncan had given him after finishing up their first big project, five hundred bucks sunk in a bottle of scotch for the building that _didn't_ burn down. He drank his way through the news reports and TV specials, and he'd've called it sensationalist bullshit except pretty much everything they said was true. Corners not just cut but missing completely. Duncan Enterprises' glittering deathtrap of a masterpiece that burned down on opening night. 

It should never have been built, they said; in the end, he tended to agree. Of course, then along came Chief O'Halloran, smoke-smudged and acerbic, filling up his TV screen. Should never have been built _that way_ , he said, just like he had the night the place went up in smoke. Doug sat up and took notice of that, if nothing else. He put down the bottle and he picked up a pen.

The inquest called Roger Simmons culpable, not that it mattered now Roger was 100% dead, but Doug barely even heard the news, his damn mind was so damn full. He emptied a bottle of scotch that was at least as old as he was down the drain as he dreamt of something new. Something he'd never thought he'd build again, after what happened in the tower that night. But the dream was there: it was a labyrinth of mental sketches growing in his mind, crisp lines and sharp angles and _done the right way_. A skyscraper was forming in there, so tall it touched the goddamn clouds. And he knew just the man to help him build it. 

O'Halloran said no the first time. Doug asked himself why, given he'd been so gung-ho about lending his help before, and he had to wonder if he couldn't smell the days-old booze on him if not the desperation. He gave it a week; he cleaned himself up, even had lunch with Jim Duncan and his daughter, then dinner with Susan, without pulling in more than a passing flash of concern. Then he went back to O'Halloran, a sheaf of drawings under his arm that were almost whipped away by the wind but even had they been, he had them right there in his head, his photographic memory some good there at least if not in the faces of the people that the tower's cut corners had killed. He spread out the pages right there in front of him, on the crumb-covered firehouse canteen table. He used O'Halloran's coffee cup to weight down the nearest corner and he told him what he wanted to build, or at least design. The right way. 

"What do you say?" he asked, and O'Halloran looked up at him from the sketches there in front of him. He'll never forget that look: it was sharp, assessing him in a moment, just like a fire, just like his life. 

"Sure," he said. "But the right way this time." He took back his coffee. He watched him over the rim of it as he took a sip. 

"The right way or not at all," Doug replied. O'Halloran nodded. And that was that. 

They worked together. It was a strange kind of experience, fragments of time stolen from around O'Halloran's schedule, phone calls cut short when the station bell rang, mornings when he breezed into Doug's rented studio smelling like wood smoke or gasoline, for God's sake, because it just wouldn't scrub out of his pores. They talked over the shitty coffee that Doug made or the good coffee of O'Halloran's, talked down at the firehouse where the other men eyed Doug coldly and the Chief with something just two steps or so away from awe. He knew what they were saying: that architect; two hundred dead; some of us. That was fine, because _never again_.

 _Never again_. O'Halloran had ideas and Doug worked out how to make them appealing. Doug had ideas and O'Halloran worked out how to shift them wide of a death trap. There were long nights that they didn't realize were long nights till they were both yawning so hard they couldn't see straight, discussions more like arguments, sitting on Doug's rented couch at 2am or jabbing fingers at his drawing board. There were long nights, arguing, in each other's faces, only angry because they both gave a damn. Sometimes he wanted to punch O'Halloran's goddamn infuriating lights out. Sometimes he wanted something else. 

And then, one night around month three, O'Halloran came in all smudged with soot, so late he got Doug out of bed to open up the door. He marched straight through Doug's bedroom and on into his shower and twenty minutes later, he came back out in a pair of Doug's plaid boxer shorts, towelling his hair. 

"You can take the couch if you're staying the night," Doug said, and O'Halloran raised his brows and told him, "Fuck that, Architect. That's a king-size bed you've got there." Then he got into the goddamn king-size bed right next to him and then turned out the light. O'Halloran turned his back to him in the streetlight through the blinds; Doug turned his too, not to be outdone. He was too tired to argue. Besides, he was right: the bed _was_ big.

"This the first time you've shared a bed with a guy?" O'Halloran asked him, to the point as ever. 

"Nope," Doug replied, and he left it at that. 

"You going to elaborate on that?" O'Halloran asked. 

"Nope," Doug replied, and O'Halloran let the conversation drop. But Doug fell asleep thinking about the guys he'd slept with back in college, something like a lifetime ago. He fell asleep thinking about Mike O'Halloran asking questions and riling him up but making him think ten times harder than he had in years. He fell asleep listening to O'Halloran snore like a goddamn drain and thinking maybe he could get used to that. 

When Doug's alarm rang in the morning, he would've reached over and turned it off just like usual, but O'Halloran was in the way so he did it instead. Then he turned his head and looked at him, with those infuriating sharp blue eyes. 

"That for me or are you just a morning person?" O'Halloran asked, with an obvious glance down toward Doug's obvious morning wood. 

"What can I say?" Doug said, already exasperated. "I've got a hard-on for life, not the local fire chief." 

O'Halloran snorted. He threw back the sheets and he turned away onto his side and he shoved his borrowed boxers down to somewhere near his knees. "Put it here," he said, and reached back to shove two fingers in between the tops of his goddamn blond-fuzzed thighs, and Doug thought _screw it_ and did exactly that. He thrust between O'Halloran's legs and reached around to get one hand around his dick, and he came just a few minutes later with his cock pressed up behind O'Halloran's infuriating balls. O'Halloran didn't last much longer than he did. Doug guessed they'd both been needing it. 

"Buy some lube and you can put it in me next time," O'Halloran said as he left the bed, with an obvious sarcastic raise of his brow than made Doug groan out loud. But he bought the damn lube and four days later, they screwed in Doug's bed after another fire. O'Halloran didn't seem to mind when Doug came in him, but maybe just 'cause after that he made Doug sleep in the damp spot. Doug, for his part, just figured fair was fair. 

The design took five months, all told, from beginning to end, from the sketch in the back of his mind to a stack of completed schematics and specifications that could have - and did - fill something like a book. It was all there on paper, worked out down to the most minute of details - the fruit of so many almost countless hours' labor, of engineering reports and plumbing, masonry, glazing, the electrics that still made his stomach perform unwelcome somersaults, considering the last time, considering what he hadn't known until it had been far too late. He still had dreams about the tower, sometimes, and O'Halloran got that. They didn't need to talk about it. They screwed instead, inconveniently, but it was easier than talking.

Jim Duncan wanted it. He wanted it from the moment he found out the two of them had been back to the tower, poking around that unstable shell of a once so nearly magnificent structure with some consultant engineer trailing in their wake, cataloguing errors as if there wasn't a report already that was so damn thick it'd prop open even the hardiest of regulation fire doors. They'd read the report, of course, cover to cover, sitting together on Doug's couch over cartons of Chinese takeout. And maybe Doug felt a little like he was returning to the scene of the crime, glass and ash beneath his feet. Maybe it felt like disturbing the dead but they pressed on, silent except when necessary, just like always. He took a deep breath of what passed for clean air there in downtown San Francisco and pretended it tasted more of the sea than the ash that clung to his skin. 

They told Duncan no, and then the new bids came in. It was Susan that sparked it all off - he knew that even though she waved the notion aside with a smile and a flick of one still so elegant wrist. He kissed her and she tried not to look pleased despite the way she frowned. He apologised, but it was a lie and they both knew it. So was the kiss, truth be told, because it wasn't even her he'd been thinking about. He hadn't thought of her in months.

He didn't take the first bid, or the second. He didn't take the highest, either; he took the one that kept him involved, that didn't mind having Doug Roberts, the guy who'd built the goddamn Glass Inferno (or who'd designed it at least) on board throughout construction. They'd do it right this time, he told them, do it right or not at all. The company's board agreed and he believed they meant it, so he took the tower to Tokyo. And O'Halloran segued right back out of his life with such remarkable ease that it was tough to tell - but for the prevailing odor of sweat and gasoline sunk into Doug's couch - that he'd even been there at all. 

Opening night went like clockwork, in spite of all Doug's fears; the tower would stand and stand and stand until who knew how many years after everyone on earth right then was dead and gone. The owners promised him more work and he said he'd give it some serious thought, though he had to admit at the time he was still getting used to the saké. He had his career back, even if he wouldn't go up the tower past floor 134. 

Opening night went like clockwork. He'd sent O'Halloran an invitation. He'd sent him a plane ticket, too, but he didn't expect him to come. At least not until he was there. 

"Architect," he said. He glanced around, drink in hand, gestured at the lobby walls. "So, I guess you really did it." 

"I guess _we_ did," Doug replied, then he smiled wryly. "No explosives this time, okay? The place looks real nice."

O'Halloran shrugged. "What can I say," he said. "I left my C4 in my other pants." He jerked his chin toward the elevators. "You want to go up?"

He didn't. What he said was, "Sure," and they went inside. Doug hit the button for the promenade floor that he'd been trying to avoid and frankly, when his stomach lurched, he couldn't say if it was from the speed or the height or the way O'Halloran kissed him, hot and hard and pressed up to the wall with a drink still in his hand that somehow didn't spill. By the time the doors slid back open, O'Halloran had stepped back again and Doug hadn't thought about the fact they'd hit floor 140. 

"You came all the way from San Francisco just for that?" Doug asked. 

O'Halloran raised his brows and almost smiled. "Sure," he said, shrugging. "Whatever helps you sleep at night." But later, down fifty floors, inside Doug's office, O'Halloran slid a ticket across his desk. San Francisco. One way. Three days' time. Doug figured _that_ was what he came for. 

"You want to build another one of these?" O'Halloran asked. 

"You got a place in mind?"

There was a photo on the wall. O'Halloran pointed; Doug didn't have to look to know what he was pointing at: the goddamn Glass Inferno. 

"Right there," O'Halloran said, and Doug didn't say no. He kissed him and called him a goddamn fool, but he didn't say no. O'Halloran had to know that meant yes. When they spent the night together in Doug's apartment on 100, he was pretty sure they both knew that meant yes. 

They left Tokyo together. Doug told himself he wasn't going back; he was moving on, at last. 

And he was pretty sure he even meant it.


End file.
